Living Life As A Game: Through And Through

[Name: Spirit Collecting Formation (Yin Condensing Quarter Complete)

Grade: Low-tier Spirit Grade

Description: A well-designed derivative of the Yin Condensing Formation. Crafted with lower quality spirit chalk, the formation, unfortunately, won"t last long. It is most useful to those below the Spirit Realm.

Current Effect: Upon activation — through galvanizing Qi or magic for the purpose of cultivation — within the area of the formation, spiritual air genesis is increased and the resulting spiritual air is pulled towards the user.]

After committing the name of the complete formation to heart, Elizabeth smirked as she snuck her right hand into her purple robes. She faked the image of there being pockets within her robes and with the activation of her Spatial Ring, one of the various Time-type peak-tier magical cores materialized on her hidden hand.

Doing her best to conceal her actions, Elizabeth brought the magical core out with her hand and quickly used the other to a.s.sist in hiding its existence. She had to go through this process as it would be obvious to anyone paying attention, the absurdity of objects randomly materializing in her hands. But the same could not be said for dematerializing or withdrawing items into her spatial ring.

However, after looking around to make sure no one was snooping, Elizabeth sighed at the thought that her actions were not needed, as no one paid her actions any attention; all the martial pract.i.tioners on the yacht were too busy with their own training at the moment. Even Atid and Luca weren"t exceptions as they found their bottlenecks in cultivation loosen dramatically after the dimensional upgrade.

Thus, Elizabeth began her breakthrough, starting with the creation of her Magic. With several Bad and Trash-tier Affinities, it was hardly an issue for her to follow through with any one of the methods she had on hand and create the first few wisps of Magic in her Dantian. However, it would go against her image to start with any kind of Magic that wasn"t Time Magic. There was also that [Temporal Flux] method that she picked up before leaving the Sky Seizing Castle that was driving Elizabeth wild with excitement just thinking of getting around to practicing its style of magic.

So, as she lay there sitting in the Spirit Collecting Formation, Elizabeth"s Inner Strength started compacting and refining itself within her Dantian according to the instructions of [Temporal Meditation] and after a couple seconds, Elizabeth"s very first wisp of Time Magic solidified its form within the tumultuous and overcrowded Dantian. Growing a bit serious now that the next part of her foundation was about to be built, Elizabeth"s eyebrows tensed as her smile receded back to neutrality, and about a tenth of her total energy reserves was sacrificed to be fertilizer for that initial Time Magic wisp.

Looking at Elizabeth, Yrre frowned as she couldn"t detect any chaos energy being used. "This won"t do at all!" thought Yrre, as she walked over to Elizabeth"s side. Yrre, didn"t cross the boundaries of the formation as that could potentially cause the inscription underneath to seize. So instead, she caused the Law Linking Chains that bound her to Elizabeth to materialize once more and used them to communicate to Elizabeth as she broke through.

Much like Yrre herself, the Law Linking Chains were all but invisible to those that Yrre didn"t wish could see, so there wasn"t much of a risk in her move. Through the connection, Yrre said, "Hey, you might want to use Chaos Requiem and the power of your Chaos Seals to improve the success of your breakthrough and keep your foundation at its level."

Astonished, Elizabeth nodded her head as she followed through with Yrre"s suggestion. More than anything, she was surprised by how Yrre"s interruption didn"t mess with her breakthrough, as it was something she had read about several times upon digesting new cultivation methods. Usually, low-level cultivators at the Mortal Realm, and even some of the lower levels of the Spirit Realm, were p.r.o.ne to Cultivation Deviation; something that even the most average pract.i.tioner knew about. Hence, the reason why it was considered taboo to bother an individual breakthrough.

Still, with there being business needing to be taken care of, Elizabeth ignored the potential loss and focused on getting the most out of this breakthrough; doing what Yrre suggested. Around her, an undetectable pressure of fragmented grandmist descended on the world with the totality of its power being directed towards the metaphysical s.p.a.ce within Elizabeth Dantian.

There, the grandmist energy easily manipulated the energy Elizabeth was working with to near-instantaneously complete the evolution of her Time magic Wisp into a peak-tier Magical Fragment. As the precursor to the Magical Pseudo Core and True Cores, this nail-sized round ma.s.s of Time energy would be where Elizabeth stored and created not just Time Magic, but all the various magics she could later form or learn.

Elizabeth had the Inner Strength to go ahead and continue expanding the size of her Magical Core, as Magical Fragments were the limits of p.a.w.n Stage cultivators and she could ascend all the way up to the peak of the Soldier Stage. However, before then, she first needed to generate Magic to saturate her muscles. With her reserves, peak-tier Magical Fragment, and grandmist pressure, the creation and integration of Magic into her muscles was as easy as can be. Yet even with the insane speed, her cultivation rose, Elizabeth didn"t look like she changed much and the changes that were apparent… it was enough to say that she didn"t look like she got stronger. Instead, she looked about the same as before, maybe even a bit frailer. But, hiding behind that una.s.suming physique of her"s, there lay a perfect p.a.w.n foundation; strong enough to wreck Soldiers and even challenge weaker Warrior Stage pract.i.tioners if it only came down to raw strength.

Elizabeth still had plenty of Inner Strength leftover even after completing the entirety of the p.a.w.n Stage, so it was with little regard that she directly moved in to enter the Soldier Stage. Using a little over half of what was left of her energy reserves, Elizabeth"s Magical Fragment evolved into mid-tier Magical Pseudo Core — the best a Solider"s cultivation could possibly contain —, increasing to the size of an egg. From there, Elizabeth needed to start using the energy of her Time-type Magical Core as what remained of her reserves wouldn"t be enough to get her through the Soldier Stage.

Picking up where her Magic left off, after fully saturating her muscles, the next step in cultivation was to integrate magic with the bones. Right about now, it became apparent to Elizabeth just how convenient it was to possess grandmist, as her Chaos Seals" ability to let her manipulate grandmist pressure allowed her to effectively guarantee perfection when integrating magic with her bones. Unlike her skin and muscles, bones were several times harder to penetrate with magic. But with grandmist pressure, the difficulty brought about by the penetrative factor effectively disappeared. Granted, using grandmist made it so Elizabeth spent a bit more of her energy on the breakthrough than she would otherwise. But for the effects grandmist brought, it was well worth the cost.

Now that she was breaking through within the Soldier Stage, Elizabeth started to burn through her reserves faster than a pierced water balloon. Thus, around the time she was halfway through her breakthrough from the 12th to the 13th level, she had to start supporting herself with the Magical Core in her hands. With her Magic Connection, the rate which she siphoned energy out of the Magical Core was unheard of, even for Kings. So, in no time at all, she finished the breakthrough event and stopped at the very tippy-top of the Soldier Stage; level 15.

Given that there was still plenty of energy within her Time-type Magical Core, even though her breakthrough was done, Elizabeth opted to continue cultivating right then and there. In conjunction with the spiritual air being gathered by the formation, Elizabeth made outstanding gains with her [Temporal Meditation] method before her cultivation stopped. Along with her meditation technique, the [Innate Strength Conversion] that had risen to Grade A also made the process of her absorbing and converting energy as simple as drinking water.

With the energy in the peak-tier Magical Core being equal to beings even stronger than Kings, Elizabeth had no trouble first bringing her personal energy reserves up to 100,000, before she finished exhausting the energy available to her by bringing her Intelligence Stat to 200, and the rest of her lagging Stats to at least 100. With these additional gains, Elizabeth could well decide to breakthrough to level 16 as well. But, she was fine where she stood at the moment and didn"t feel the need to rush things. There was potential to be gained, and given that no more major foundation building events would unfold until she could pa.s.s into the Spirit Realm, there wasn"t a real need to breakthrough as soon as possible.